You should use Calcnet routines.  Also, please make the switching optional, because I hate chess games that do that.  It just bugs me. ;-)

Switching will be optional in the next update. But it only does it in two player mode, it one player mode it leaves the board in whichever orientation makes sense for the entire game.

Also, where's the calc serial number stored?

I'm assuming you mean where in the calculator. It is in the certificate and is retrievable via bcall($807E).

You should still definetely put either link play or 2-player, though. It's more fun when you get to swear at your opponent and he has to listen.

It has 2-player mode. And soon it will spin the board around between turns. (So you are looking from the correct side.)

One bug I noticed: Queenside castling is broken... it moved the wrong rook (from the h-file to the f-file, instead of a- to d-), and overwrote my bishop

That used to work, but I must have screwed it up when I made castling stop disabling the AI.


Also, some things I have planned.
-Save games (multiple with a file name you pick)
-Look at board from correct side
-Undo button
-Options menu
-If the AI starts to take forever, I'll add in an option to disable grayscale during thinking
-The AI needs to understand piece protection, this will fix Goplat's problem and hopefully allow it to checkmate

There is one byte in statVars (I assume L2) that mirage uses. That is $8A4A. If it is 1, mirage quits to the homescreen. If it is anything else, it doesn't.

To all the googlers who come through here. The newest version is over at ticalc.org.

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My friends at school told me to make chess. So I did.

I started this on wednesday, so it's pretty new. But it's awesome.



This is me playing against the calculator. I played in 50% speed, so don't think I'm a chess genius. Some strange stuff happens in that game though, like me castling out of check (legal?), it cheating its way out of checkmate, followed by me losing my queen, and then it forks me with a knight.

Since you're wondering, here is how the AI works. It looks through every single possible move and gives it a rating. It then chooses randomly from the top 4 unless there is one clear obvious choice. This way, you don't always play the same game, but the CPU won't pass up an obvious move. This rating is calculated, as of now, by this formula.

4*capture + 3/2*(threatAgainstCpuFinal - threatAgainstCpuInitial) + (threatAgainstPlayerInitial - threatAgainstPlayerFinal)

Each piece is rated on the usual scale. (pawn = 1, bishop = 3, knight = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9, king = 10) To calculate threat, you look at the sum of the reward of all possible attacks. So if there is a lone rook out in the center, and two different pieces can capture it, the threat would be 5 + 5 = 10.

As far as grayscale goes on this one, I'm trying out a new system. The first time you run the program on your calculator, it asks you to calibrate the flicker and adjust the contrast. Then it stores these values internally and never asks you again. But what makes this one different is that when you send it to your friend, it will ask them to recalibrate it even though you have already done so on yours. How? Along with the contrast and delay, it also stores the calcSerial. So if the stored serial and the real serial don't match, it asks to recalibrate.

In it's current state, this game is very playable. The only thing it lacks is pawn promotion, but I even included en passant. The menus however need serious work, the current ones are just to make navigation possible.

And for those people who will ask, GRAPH quits.

It made my eyes warm and gave them a semi watery feel. Which I'm sure can only be good.

The 84+'s are supposed to be 15MHz. But the careful technique I use in that program shows that they are much faster than that. I know it works because if wabbitemu had the proper clock cycles for adc a, imm8, it would show exactly 15,000,000Hz, which is exactly what it's clocked to. (I forget the math, but if you adjust the number, it comes out right.)

And if you're still not a believer, take a song clocked for your calculator and run it in wabbitemu or vice versa. In wabbitemu it will crawl and on your calculator it will go way too fast.

If you want a real challenge. (Depends on how good you are at it.) You could try to make a segway. I've seen it done so I know it's possible.

Looks great. I love to games still being made in asm.

When you're doing your grayscale. How are you drawing it? Across rows or down columns? Because while there is a slight speed cost for drawing across rows, you'll notice an improvement in flicker.